Having my way with Ulysses

Though they stink yet they sting.

Look and see if anything is as great as this.12:34 am

Everything’s a temporary dream. Look at the great pyramid, my creation of longest duration.  A fat triangle in the desert, eh? You think they call me thrice great for nothing? I’m still dripping with the music of mathematics from since I played at dividing flowers and sweeties. I mean listen to it and work it out like a good young idiot. You people couldn’t do the half. Are you divided from your own organs? Listen to the harmonies of proportion and ratio; what composer tell me ever moved number so well. All is lost. You think I left it looking like that fat heap it is now, squat and spreading. But do you do anything about it, no. Nothing. Renovate it. Go ahead, it needs it. You have my permission, if not my help. Put some people on the job. Choose your most, your beautiful, your delicious, and your delightfuls, force them to say coactus volui and give them my pyramid so it might sing again. Paint upon it a diabolic rictus of black luminosity. Give it phosphorescent scorpion tongues. Paint its shafts like coal black throats and shine lights through them so out of itself it would make itself a lamp. Let the shafts open their windpipes to the outside all bloodred and sing. Add a few octaves. Here and or there. I’d hum along to that. Cover it. Take the original and jazz it up. What did I do when it was mine? I divided myself with the potentiality of it. Then I made a choice and left the rest unchosen. I covered it with white limestone and polished it to a mirror. And the sides: they were two in one and one in two. You think you see a triangle there? Look again. There are eight sides and though they sink yet they sing when the sun hits dead on. On the solstice the mirrors’ split face would absorb refract no reflect a divided sun like what do you call it gossamer. Is it a dream to think there’s nothing new under the sun?

Bueñas noches, Señorita Blanca.

Whoso therefore knows how to conjoin the principles, or direct the work, to impregnate, to mortify, to putrify, to generate, to quicken the species, to make white, cleanse the vulture from his blackness and darkness so he is purged by the fire and tinged, and purified from all his spots, shall be possessor of a treasure so great, that even kings themselves shall venerate him.11:36 pm

Careful that whore riding the dragon. Password. This way to the lower world, three turns to the right then you’ll find your divine spirit in the depths of matter. Don’t believe me? Doesn’t matter. Not important. You’re in, you figure it out. A hint, friend. The more you putrefy the more likely you’ll purify. Understand? Have you no soul? You have hope, you say. Hope. you think that’s enough? Please. Pandora, you know her? Cheap whore that one but a nice kid. She let all the evils out of her jar for the world’s grief and left hope inside. Smart girl.  Oye tell me, yeah, if you’re so smart, if you know everything about sin then what’s hope? What was hope doing in the jar with all the other baddies? Lucky it stayed in there. Right. So. See there my vulture’s shadow? Follow it. Now go. Estúpido. Quién no tiene fuerza para matar la realidad no es lo suficientemente fuerte como para crearlo. Hablar conmigo de esperanza. Estoy grandeza tres veces. Estoy palabras en acción. Te ves en todos los estratos del ser y es mi cara que ves. Soy el mago que creó magia! Estoy sentido inagotable. Hice el culo sólo pensar en ello. Hablar conmigo de esperanza.  You still here?  I said go.

Noble words coming. Look out. Could you try your hand at it yourself?

12:46 pm

[Scene:  Atop Mount Pisgah in Madaba, Jordan, two men gaze to the west and the southwest and reminisce.]

Manetho:  This view transfigures the soul.  Do you have a light?

Moses:  Use the bush.  Yes, soultransfiguring.   I never lived there you know.  I came this close.

Manetho:  Frustrating.

Moses:  Yup.

Manetho:  [bends over the flames, his unglazed linen collar appears behind his bent head soiled by his withering hair.  He rises and the men smoke together, their smokes ascending in frail stalks that flower with their speech]  Handy, that.  Yes, so close.  And for what dear Moses?  Why did you Jews not accept our culture, our religion, our language.  We were the greatest, the biggest, the baddest of them all.  What were you?  Not much.  No wealth, no country, no nothing.  Primitives.  Babies.  We had ages of history, polity, priesthoods, literature.  It boggles, your choice, it boggles the mind.

Moses:  I died here.  No I didn’t enter the land I was promised.  I died instead, a sudden-at-the-moment-though-from-lingering-illness-often-previously-expectorated-demise.

Manetho:  And with a great future behind you.  You must feel such regret.  All this way, intoxicated by an obscure idol.  And just one, imagine!  We had Isis!  We had Ammon Ra!  Not to mention Osiris, Horus, Anubis, Seth, Nut, Thoth.  I could go on.  As above so below.  How can you Jews create a civilization with just one deity?  And we had more.  We were strong with armies and with ships.  We had trade.  You were weak, plagued with daylabourers.  The world trembled at our name; they heard your name and said who?

Moses:  And then what?  As much as you rose you were destroyed, over and again.  You rose and you decayed.  We could have stayed and bowed our will and our spirit, and we could have prayed to your armies and deities.  Yes we might have stayed by the fleshpots tasting the salt bread.  And then?  And then?

Manetho: [belches] Then assimilation into Egyptian life.  You realize that even those things which are subject to decay are good.  Nothing can be corrupted if it were not in some way good.  And yet that which is corrupt is still good, for if a thing were deprived of all good, it would not exist at all.

Moses:  Ah, curse you!  That’s Saint Augustine.  And he is talking about the creations of the obscure idol we chose instead of your life, your will.  And that God of obscurity, that soultransfiguring God led us in a pillar of smoke, like these we create together, but singular and beautiful, swirling and undulating shapeless shapes.  We followed that pillar of cloud by day and left our house of bondage.  I spoke with the ineffable.  Have you any idea of that?  The eternal spoke to me on mountaintops.  On this one, here.  This very place.

Manetho:  You Jews became outlaws.

Moses:  We were  given the law, and we shine even now with the light of inspiration.  Had we stayed we would have been enslaved.  You did us evil, you Egyptians, and you tortured us, saddling us with punishing work.  Our God, the Pure One who dwells on high, raised up a community, a people beyond counting.  And let me ask you this, Manetho, whose name is more remembered: mine, or any in your lists of kings?

Manetho:  Ok.  Ok.  Next year in Jerusalem.

Moses:  You’d better believe it.

Manetho:  I do take exception to your last point.  What has ever been greater than Egyptian civilization or lasted so long?  And what people today are so kind, so beautiful.  But Moses, remember please, all things that rise must fall and then must rise and then must fall and then rise again and fall again.  The masters of the Mediterranean are fellaheen today.  We all have our day.

Moses:  We all have our day.

Thus Spake Zaraϑuštra

Also Spuke Zerothruster.9:39 am

Who am I?  So many have told of me and have spoken with my mouth.  They say I invented magic and then poof! I made astrology appear.  With that I gained the foreknowledge of truth that diligent stargazing affords the patient.  But those who lived my life didn’t stop there, oh no, not when it was relentlessly clear that I had invented truth itself.  Believe me.  That’s when my magic, they tell me, turned to the black variety and I became fearsome.  Those closest loved me, especially for the words they said with my voice.  He that stealeth from the poor lendeth to the lord.  I became for some a prophet of God!  Imagine that.  Nietzsche even said that the priests, those poets of the Veda, were unfit to unfasten my sandals.  Of course I too was a Vedic Priest.  As I understand, in that capacity I wrote millions and millions of lines of verse.  To give myself enough time for such a task, I invented the week.  You’re welcome.  And born from necessity, I invented hieroglyphics; I used them to hide my invention of Alchemy.  Well to speak the truth that element of my curriculum vitae never quite stuck; Those who move Hermes Trismegistus’ mouth had that particular market cornered.  Better PR.  In my later career I denied to oblivion many deities so I could invent a singular monotheistic morality.  Then Nietzsche used my voice to deny morality in favor of truth, my prior invention.  Ay me.  Well, what could I do?  My life is an accomplishment of others.  Rather grand and famous others too, I might add.  I was the teacher of Pythagoras, they say.  Plato liked the words in my mouth so much that he passed them off as his own.  Excuse me, Socrates’ own.  I was even Yeats’ pen pal!  There’s a laugh to rival the one I had on the day I was born.  My head came out pulsating and there I was, infant tiny thing giggling away.  To my mother’s horror my head could repel the touch of a hand.  You can’t touch this.  Oh a unique birth to be sure.  And rather an unnatural death as well.  I’m rather proud of this one.  By the time of my doom people were calling me a living star.  Can you imagine?  Me, a star!  So how does a star die?  I was murdered by another star.  Was it really a meteor?  Maybe lightning?  You’re asking me?  You show me what’s real.  I wouldn’t know, I wasn’t there.